Precarious empowerment on TikTok: gendered digital informality and the paradox of new survival economies

This ongoing research explores socioeconomic insecurity (Probst, 2008) in Southern Italy through a mixed-methods approach (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004), with particular attention to the forms of female inactivity and marginality that translate into digital informal work (Williams, 2010; Williams, 2019; Park, 2025).
The condition of “autonomy” of digital traders and the invisibility of housewives’ domestic work (Fortunati, 2007) emerge as different but intertwined configurations of precariousness. In this context, home-based work and the emerging practices of live shopping on platforms such as TikTok represent a privileged observatory of bottom-up strategies to counter impoverishment, in response to the crisis of the welfare system and policies for female employment.
Live shopping is not only a new sales model but also a significant transformation of digital commerce that intertwines entertainment, interaction, and creativity within the domestic space (Conor, 2015; Harini, 2024; Puspawati, 2023).
The integrated analysis of official statistical sources, digital ethnography, and interviews enables the presentation of both macro-perspectives and micro-life stories, which are capable of describing the processes of redefining housewives’ economic survival strategies (Jarrett, 2016).
Live shopping thus constitutes a field of tensions between marginality and innovation, exclusion and new forms of empowerment. The informality of platforms opens up spaces for micro-entrepreneurship and self-employment, for equitable access to economic resources for housewives but at the same time raises questions about new forms of self-exploitation and the balance between work and care (Arcidiacono, 2024; Farinella, 2021).
Can digital labour (Fuchs, 2014), which by its very nature is not equally accessible and is potentially a generator of social and economic inequality, represent a real future alternative for inactive women? My research aims to clarify this paradox from a local and gendered perspective.